


all things by law divine

by astrid_fischer



Category: The Wicked + The Divine
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, WicDiv 1831, basically: if there had been a baphomet (or the potential for one) in the 1831 pantheon, it's an AU of an AU y'all i go hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-18
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-11-02 01:35:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10934256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrid_fischer/pseuds/astrid_fischer
Summary: “I would take you with me if I could,” Morrigan said then, and Cameron laughed low, dropping his head to the crook of Morrigan’s shoulder, and said against Morrigan’s skin, “What a perfectly terrible thing to tell someone.”But after a few moments had passed, he whispered in a voice like prayer, “I would go.”Morrigan felt more alive than he had in over a year.





	all things by law divine

Lucifer had put it thusly, drinking the last of the wine brought back from Provence earlier that summer while reclining on the red velvet settee in Morrigan’s private study, hours after Woden had gotten fed up and banned them from the sitting room: 

“Like meets like, my dear.”

It was the first time he said it to Morrigan, but certainly not the last, over the months to follow. Sometimes chastising, sometimes amused, always mocking.

What he meant was, becoming a god had a funny way of ensuring that one had very little time for anyone who wasn’t.

What he meant was, they all had each other (for a given value of having): why bother with anyone else?

Lucifer had lived in this era for a year and a half, Morrigan and Woden for almost a year, and Inanna for barely half that, Inanna who had been chosen last among their shrinking pantheon -- and they were all of them running out of time.

Perhaps those dwindling months were why Lucifer, moreso than any of them, held forth so frequently and grandly about how little interest he had in regular humans and their regular lasting lives.

“Although of course,” Lucifer had opined, stretching luxuriantly and winking one ruby eye in Morrigan’s direction, “There is interest and then there is  _ interest _ , dear Morrigan, as you know so well.”

Morrigan had. Morrigan did.

 

*****

 

Consciousness and memory worked differently, after he Became.

It was difficult to remember a time before he was a god. It was more difficult still to recall how things were when he and Woden were still who they were, and not what they turned into. Too blurred one day, too painfully sharp the next.

Still themselves, and nothing like themselves. It was a paradox that might have driven one mad -- and could, if Morpheus’ deepening paranoia and increasingly illegible letters were anything to go by.

Divinity was difficult to contain in a mortal vessel without destroying that vessel entire.

It was why so few of them even made it to the end, before the sand in their two-year glass had a chance to run out.

Were the two of them happy, once? Yes, he remembered they were happy, once. At the beginning of them, before the beginning of this. Sublimely happy. Incandescently so.

But that thought -- that bleak contrast between  _ then  _ and  _ now  _ \-- was a misery unlike the poetic ones he delighted in. It was too sad even to be beautiful, and so he did not think of it often.

Woden did not care about his comings and goings anymore. She had made that all too clear, and now retreated to the fortress of her own study when they were in London alone and treated him with a frosty tolerance when in mixed company abroad. She rolled her eyes when he spoke and shuddered whenever he so much as touched her.

A month previous, and he would have agreed with Lucifer. What use had he, what use had any of them for humans untouched by divinity, humans with no spark of godhood? No one could burn so brightly with so much time left to them; that was the gift the twelve of them had been given. The gift and the curse.

And once you had spent all of your days up in the heavens surrounded by the very brightest stars, you looked back to earth below and couldn’t see a thing because the light from above had blinded you.

That was what he had thought.

Until a month ago, when the boy with green eyes had changed the metaphor.

No, not just changed. He rewrote it. Smashed it into pieces. He destroyed it entirely and created a new one.

The world was all a shadow realm and he was the only light in it. He was like gold foil catching the sun.

 

*****

 

They were near the Smithfield market, and it was soon after the third child had died. Morrigan remembered it was then because Woden was paler than usual, and winced whenever the carriage jolted over cobblestones. She had barely spoken to him the entire ride there.

It seemed to annoy her whenever he addressed her, because her demeanor grew still chillier, but the lack of conversation was stifling and tiresome and so he had deliberately lingered over a rare bookseller’s stall, despite the fact that it was anything but, some time after she had returned to the carriage.

That was when he heard the music.

That was when, for the second time in a year, his life changed entirely. For the second time in a year, the world stopped turning and began anew on a different axis.

It was only a single flute, nothing like the orchestra it felt like. A simple flute, played by a boy who was anything but simple. His black hair gleamed in the sun as he played, across the square and seemingly unaware -- unlike the loudly whispering booksellers and cloth merchants -- that he was in the presence of a god.

After what felt like hours but could only have been minutes, he stopped playing, to scattered applause, and began to collect his things, pocketing the coins given to him. Morrigan crossed the busy square, ignoring everyone in his path. They would move out of his way. They always did.

Whispers followed him, and increased in pitch as he approached the boy. He supposed his intent was obvious, and that was what so scandalized them -- laws and morality did not constrain gods, but London’s citizens were not so open-minded as the pantheon. It was tedious.

He did not care if he was obvious. He did not care what they thought.

When he reached the flute player, he had disassembled the instrument and was carefully wrapping it up in scraps of dark cloth, unaware that he was no longer alone.

“Did you escape the underworld on your own?” Morrigan asked. Dry leaves skittered past on the cobblestones. “Or did you charm Hades once again into granting you freedom?”

It was a flawed allegory, of course, when Hades was but a few days’ journey away in Florence, and no more relegated to the underworld than any of the rest of them. Still, Morrigan had never let the truth interfere with poetry. Poetry was always far truer than any earthly truth could hope to be.

“I beg your pardon?” the boy asked. He said it with a skeptical slant to his voice, very much as if he was accustomed to ridiculous things being said to him because he looked like Adonis reborn. He still had not seen Morrigan. He finished at last with his belongings and looked up, running a hand through his unruly hair.

He froze in mid-motion as he saw who it was that had spoken to him. Who was standing there, before him, in the middle of an ordinary marketplace. Morrigan heard the faint, satisfying catch of his breath in his throat.

Morrigan knew well how his presence affected people. He looked only peripherally human, and did not try to appear more so. He brought the shadows with him even into daylight.

“You have it,” Morrigan said in answer, with the slightest inclination of his head. “You may have anything you like.”

If he had said it a different way, it might have been innocuous. He took care not to.

Shock gave way to something else. Those green eyes dropped from Morrigan’s, slowly, to linger instead at his mouth. Only for a fraction of a second, but long enough by far. He was a quick study; he would, Morrigan supposed, in such a world as this, have no other choice but to be.

“Anything?” he repeated quietly. As if he might have been mistaken. As if Morrigan might realize his implication and take it back.

“Anything,” Morrigan said again, after some seconds had passed. He was too absorbed studying every shadow and plane of the boy’s face, committing them all to memory. “I would have only your name in return.”

“It’s Cameron,” the boy said. “Cameron Turner.”

“There’s no need to lie to me. I know you for who you truly are.”

Morrigan watched as confusion flickered across the boy’s handsome face. He leaned in closer. “Orpheus,” he murmured, as if telling a secret. “No mere mortal could create music so fair.”

Cameron colored slightly under his scrutiny, or perhaps from his proximity.

It was not an unusual reaction, in London. Everyone knew who they were here. Word had spread all over, from city to country: of Lucifer’s lavish clandestine parties from which not everyone returned. Of Woden’s mysterious writings and her invented crow with its eerie red glass eyes. Of the real coal-black birds which followed at Morrigan’s heels throughout Southwark when he did not think to curb them.

“Sir is too kind by half,” Cameron said.

“No,” Morrigan said, with a slow smile. “Never that. But I will keep my silence.”

“Surely I can reward it somehow,” Cameron said.

He asked Morrigan for paper, which Morrigan produced from somewhere in the depths of his coat, and then borrowed the bit of charcoal a woman selling glassware was using for her inventory to scrawl something on it.

When he handed it back, their fingers brushed together. Morrigan’s skin was singing.

He looked down at the scrap of paper, upon which was written, in neat, slanting writing, an unfamiliar address.

“My studio,” the boy said, and met his eyes with the faintest blush, wetting his bottom lip with his tongue. “In case sir should ever wish to hear more.”

It was bold, too bold for both propriety and legality, and it quite took Morrigan’s breath away.

People were not often bold with him. People were afraid of him. They were in awe of him. They certainly did not ask him, in broad daylight, in the middle of a busy square, to come to their apartments.

“I do,” Morrigan said. “I will.”

He pocketed the paper and returned to the carriage. He looked back as he went. The boy with green eyes was watching him go.

Woden was staring out the opposite window, lost in thought. She did not ask where he had been.

 

*****

 

The address was in Camden Town, and Morrigan chose to avoid what was doubtless to be a stilted, boring supper in favor of traveling there instead.

When he knocked on the door, it went unanswered for long enough that he thought to leave. A bare second after that, it swung inwards, and there was Cameron.

His hair was tousled into soot-black curls, there was a flush on his pale cheeks, and his green eyes were dark. His white shirt was unlaced well past the point of impropriety.

He looked as if he had been sleeping. He looked plucked from a faerie dream.

And his eyes widened as he realized who was standing on his doorstep.

“I didn’t expect you so soon,” he said, and the minute pause between the first four words and the two last told Morrigan everything he needed to know, despite the boy’s earlier bravado. There was making an offer and there was expecting the offer to be accepted, and those were two very different things.

“You asked, and so I came,” Morrigan said. “Do not take it lightly. Not just anyone has the power to so command me.”

“Is that what I did?” Cameron asked, eyes intent on Morrigan’s. “I thought to extend an invitation, not issue a command.”

“I am defenseless against either,” Morrigan said. “Shall I come in?”

Cameron stood aside wordlessly, and the god brushed past him into his studio. It was warm inside, partly because the tiny, cluttered space boasted only one tiny window, high up, and partly due to the fire crackling low in its grate in one corner of the dim rom.

“Would you like me to play for you?” Cameron asked from behind him, and Morrigan turned. There was a faint tremor in his voice, the first sign of fear Morrigan had gleaned from him yet, and even that was so slight as to be unnoticed. “That is why you have come, isn’t it?”

Cameron caught his breath when Morrigan reached out and pushed fingers through his hair, tracing down the line of his jaw to his throat, and further still, finally splaying a pale hand over the bared skin of his chest to feel his heartbeat thudding beneath.

“You know why I’ve come,” Morrigan said.

Cameron held very still and lifted unafraid green eyes to the god. “Are you not even going to ask?”

“What need is there?” Morrigan inquired. He hooked a finger in the open neck of Cameron’s shirt, and had only to tug slightly to draw him a step closer. “You’ve already answered me. Every look you have given me from the first time I saw you, you have answered me.”

He leaned in slowly to press his lips to the other man’s throat, felt him tremble faintly. “Your soul calls out to me like a lighthouse in the dark,” he murmured against his skin.

“Does it?” Cameron asked, breathless. “How troublesome.”

He did not wait to be touched further, as if Morrigan’s fingertips grazing his chest, his mouth brushing his skin, was permission enough.

Or even better, as if he didn’t need permission at all.

He was the one to lean forward those last few inches, take Morrigan’s face in his hands, and kiss him first. To kiss him deeply, desperately, as if despite having only met him an hour ago, he’d wanted to touch him for far longer. For months. For years. For lifetimes.

He was the one to draw Morrigan back with him, step by step, until they reached the unmade bed. He was the one to tug slightly on Morrigan’s shirtfront to pull him down with him onto the rumpled sheets.

“Are you not going to ask?” Morrigan asked, giving Cameron’s words back to him, hands braced on the sheets on either side of the boy’s head.

“You already said I may have anything,” Cameron said. His eyes were dark. “I want everything.”

 

*****

 

Lucifer would often (such were his whims) reach to Morrigan and pull him into a lazy kiss. When he wanted something. When he was feeling particularly affectionate. When he was bored.

It wasn’t just Morrigan, either, although even Lucifer never dared try it on Woden. But Hades, certainly. Morpheus, occasionally, although these days he may not have noticed it -- or anything else, for that matter -- through the haze of opium.

And Morrigan had had dalliances before, in the country and even occasionally in London itself. Flirtations and assignations of little import, scarcely even memorable.

None of that was any matter, because it didn’t mean anything.

This was different. This meant everything.

 

*****

 

_ Nothing in the world is single _

_ All things by law divine  _

_ In one another’s being mingle _

_ \-- Why not I with thine? _

“What does it mean?” Cameron asked.

Morrigan sat cross-legged in bed, scratching out a faulty line with too much force; the ink spattered across his hands and left black specks like stars on the sheets.

He looked over at Cameron, broken from his reverie. “Hm?”

“You were reading aloud,” Cameron said. He was lying tangled in the bedclothes with his head propped up on one hand, watching Morrigan with that hungry expression he got when Morrigan recited scraps of poetry to him. He never looked more beautiful.

Morrigan set his papers aside. They suddenly seemed entirely unimportant. “It means, kiss me.”

“You take me for an idiot,” the boy said. He sounded darkly amused, as if he did not mind terribly what Morrigan thought of him. He traced a finger over Morrigan’s open palm on the sheets next to him. Morrigan found every small movement mesmerizing.

“No,” Morrigan said, smoothing a hand through Cameron’s hair, twisting his fingers through the silky strands. “Never that. Kiss me.”

Cameron resisted, the way he had taken to doing recently. Just slightly. Just enough to make something dark and possessive rise up in Morrigan.

Cameron knew it, too. Morrigan could tell from the gleam in his darkening eyes. “Why do you do this?” he murmured, tightening his grip hard enough to elicit a gasp.

Instead of answering, Cameron looped an arm around Morrigan’s neck and dragged him down for a kiss before disentangling himself from both Morrigan and the bedclothes, getting to his feet gloriously naked in the weak winter sun filtering through the window. There was ink from Morrigan’s hands smeared across one pale shoulder like black blood.

“I have to do something,” he said quietly, looking back.

Morrigan didn’t ask what he meant. If he thought about it, he already knew.

 

*****

 

Morrigan had not thought himself a jealous god.

Morrigan was wrong.

He could visit Camden Town as often as he liked, since distance and transportation were not the barriers that they were to everyone else. Still, he was busy, with his own writings and with whatever entertainments one or many of the rest of the pantheon had come up with on a given evening.

Despite that, and quite without meaning to, he fell into a pattern of staying with Cameron nearly every night. Sometimes he’d arrive earlier in the day and they would walk together for a while, or Cameron would play his music while Morrigan lay with his head in his lap in some park or other.

Sometimes he wouldn’t leave Southwark until deep into the night, and he would manifest in the shadows of Cameron’s rooms. No matter how late it was, Cameron always came awake instantly, pushing himself up on one elbow as Morrigan came closer and tipping his head back to be kissed, as if he had been waiting.

(As if he was always waiting, Morrigan thought, and pushed the thought away as soon as he touched it. Guilt was an uncomfortable feeling, prickling.)

There was a night midweek in the depths of winter when Morrigan had promised to come, and then Lucifer stopped by the town house unannounced with a great deal of wine and Morrigan had lost track of time, and then -- as Lucifer leaned forward to pull his loose evening shirt down off one shoulder and dragged his teeth over the bare skin there -- all of his senses entirely, and had not recovered them until the following morning.

He went to Cameron’s the next night, but the windows were dark and affixed to the peeling paint of his locked door was a note in his familiar hand, saying only  _ I waited. You may wait tonight _ .

None of them was omnipotent. Their magics took different forms, and while Morrigan had his ways of knowing where his fellow gods were, with or without London, that did not extend to everyone.

He ought to have had no way of finding his wayward Orpheus.

He  _ ought  _ not, except he had spent so much of his time focused on little else that all he had to do was consider where Cameron might be before the knowledge came to him, almost unbidden.

Where he was. What he was doing.

Morrigan was not immediately aware of anything after that.

 

*****

 

It was a tavern, or it was a whorehouse, or it was some muddling of the two. Cameron was in an upstairs room, permitting himself to be pressed to the wall by a man with curling blond hair, his eyes closed, making soft sounds that ought to be for Morrigan alone.

“What the bloody--” the man snarled when he found himself wrenched backwards, tripping over himself and sprawling back onto the floor. The words died in his throat as he looked up at Morrigan, color draining from his face. “I--”

“Get  _ out _ ,” Morrigan said in more than one voice at once, and the stranger scrambled to his feet and did, slamming the door back on its hinges.

Crows followed him, sharp-beaked and coal black. Screams echoed down the hallway.

Cameron was still leaned up against the peeling paint of the wall, eyes big and dark and mouth kiss-swollen from someone else’s lips.

He looked stunned. Then he looked angry.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, straightening and tilting his chin up, a child’s defiance. There was a bruise darkening on the side of his throat, and the sight of it made a dull roaring rise up in Morrigan’s ears.

“Do not test me,” Morrigan said. “Not now.”

“Call off your birds,” Cameron said, pulling his unlaced shirt back together with angry, jerking movements. “All this spectacle, and for what? Don’t pretend you  _ care _ .”

Morrigan took hold of his arm, dragging him forward a step. “You are  _ mine _ ,” he said, and it was more of a hiss than anything. All around them was the sound of wings, deafening, maddening, drowning out everything. “Mine  _ only _ .”

“You have a wife,” Cameron said, wrenching his arm free. His suspenders were still undone and he shrugged one on. “ _ And  _ your pantheon of godly lovers. You belong to all of bloody London, and I am to be  _ yours only _ ?”

“ _ Yes _ ,” Morrigan said, with dire threat heavy in a voice that barely sounded his own.

He hadn’t consciously meant to remove them, in the whirl of feathers, and yet here they were back in Camden Town, in the shadows of Cameron’s unlit studio. Cameron did not seem even to notice.

“I want you to leave,” he said in a low, furious voice, pointing towards the door. “I want you to  _ get out  _ and leave me in peace.”

“As you desire,” Morrigan said coldly, and turned to go.

He made it not five steps before Cameron was in front of him again. “No,” he said, and he sounded wretched but then his hands were in Morrigan’s hair, his forehead pressed against Morrigan’s own, and Morrigan took hold of him and kissed him soundly.

He kissed him possessively, fiercely. He kissed him until Cameron went pliant in his arms, whimpered against his lips, wordless pleas that Morrigan drank in greedily.

He kissed him to make him forget anyone who had ever touched him before, and ever would again.

“Damn you,” Cameron said wildly when they broke apart. He said it as if he truly meant it, as if he would condemn Morrigan to hell itself if it was in his power. “I can’t bear this. I can’t be free of you.”

“You think it is any different for me?” Morrigan asked, taking Cameron’s face in his hands and brushing his thumbs over the other man’s cheekbones. His voice sounded nearly human again. “On your account I might have burned the city to the ground tonight. I would not have been sorry.”

Cameron made a soft sound of surprise.

“You went there to hurt me,” Morrigan said. It was not a question.

“Of course I did,” Cameron said, with a ragged laugh. “I don’t want anyone else. I don’t even know what it would feel like.”

Morrigan let his hands fall from Cameron’s face, trying and failing to understand. “Have I made you so unhappy as to deserve this?”

“You have made me miserable,” Cameron said. “And you have made me impossibly happy.” He let his eyes slip shut, lashes dark against his pale skin, and then opened them again. He took a shuddering breath before he spoke next. “You’ve ruined me, don’t you see? All I am is you. I can’t remember what I was before.”

He broke off. His hesitation was visible, the checking of words almost said. “You go where you please and do whatever you like with whoever you like,” he said at last, more quietly, “and I can do nothing at all about it. I have no hold over you. You possess all the power, all of it. I just wanted to try and take some small piece of it back.”

“Is that what you think?” Morrigan asked, after a moment of silence. “Is that what I have somehow made you believe? That you have no hold over me?”

“It’s what I know,” Cameron said, hurt but still defiant. “I am no fool.”

“Oh, but it seems you are,” Morrigan said, and Cameron flinched and tried to pull away but Morrigan tipped his face back up, making him meet his gaze.

“A most foolish child indeed,” Morrigan murmured. “How can it be that you still don’t understand? I have been powerless from the first moment I met you. You have gotten into my blood, my bones, my very soul, and I cannot carve you back out.”

“There is no need to lie to me,” Cameron said, eyes downcast. “You have me regardless, whether you care for me or not.”

“I never lie,” Morrigan said. “Not to you.”

It was impossible to tell if Cameron believed him or not. When he next spoke, a moment later, it was to say, “I wasn’t sure you would come to find me.”

Morrigan frowned, because it was clear that Cameron meant it. “Did you not hear me the first time?” he asked. “Very well, I will repeat myself. You  _ belong  _ to me.”

He said it fiercely enough that Cameron looked back at him. “I will always come for you,” Morrigan said. “I would have pulled London apart stone by stone to find you.”

Cameron looked lost for a moment, wide-eyed and vulnerable, as if he had expected anything in creation but that. Then he inhaled raggedly and lunged forward to kiss him hard, pushing at the lapels of Morrigan’s snow-dusted coat until he let it be tugged down off his shoulders.

Cameron pressed himself up against Morrigan with the same desperation that Morrigan still felt wild with. “Stay with me,” he whispered, naked pleading in his voice. He was so warm compared to the chill of winter outside.“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Don’t go.”

“I won’t,” Morrigan promised, but still Cameron said it again, “Don’t go,” and then, voice breaking on the last word, “Don’t go back to them.”

There was little question as to who he meant. Morrigan did not insult him by asking.

“I won’t,” he said, even though he should not have, even though he ought not to have felt he owed him anything, even though he did not answer to anybody.

He answered to Cameron all the same.

_ Not just anyone holds that power,  _ he had said to Cameron the first day they’d met. He had never meant for it to be true.

“Promise me in return,” Morrigan commanded, in the voice he so often used with others and so seldom with Cameron, pulling at the laces of Cameron’s already loosened shirt so hard he tore them. “Swear that what happened tonight will never happen again while I am on this earth.”

“I promise,” Cameron said, letting his head fall back so Morrigan could get at his throat. He did not seem to mind terribly the ruination of his garment. “Gods, I promise.”

Cameron had been raised Catholic, and despite his lapsed faith was still often accidentally devout. He crossed himself automatically at hearing bad news and kept a rosary tucked into one of his drawers, near the bed.

If he noticed that he swore by Morrigan now, and not his God, he did not let on.

“I wish you could stay with me,” Cameron said, quietly, later, and they both knew he did not mean here, tonight, in Camden Town.

There was a long silence, and then at last, “I wish that also,” Morrigan whispered, and heard Cameron’s slight inhalation in the following silence like it was a revelation.

It was not something he admitted often, because there was no point to it. Admitting the truth only served to make it worse, and solved nothing.

It was preferable by far to act as if he didn’t care, to refuse to dwell on the ever-present hourglass hanging over his head, because if he admitted the depths of his fear he would drown in it.

It was easier to admit even a sliver of that fear in the dark.

“Do you love me?”

Morrigan sighed, but it was indulgent rather than cross. “Have I not said as much already?”

“Owning is not the same as love,” Cameron said. “Surely a poet should know that.”

“I told you,” Morrigan said. “I would destroy the world for you. I would do anything for you. Yes, I love you.”

“ _ Only _ me?” And this was bolder.

“Yes, you monstrous creature,” Morrigan said, and wondered when it had first started being true. How it could have happened without him realizing. “Only you.”

“I would take you with me if I could,” Morrigan said then, and Cameron laughed low, dropping his head to the crook of Morrigan’s shoulder, and said against Morrigan’s skin, “What a perfectly terrible thing to tell someone.”

But after a few moments had passed, he whispered in a voice like prayer, “I would go.”

Morrigan felt more alive than he had in over a year.

 

*****

 

“I didn’t used to be like this,” Cameron said in the morning. He looked younger in the mornings, less sharp-edged and more vulnerable. At Morrigan’s questioning look, he smiled the ghost of a smile and supplied, “Cruel.”

“You wear it well,” Morrigan said.

 

*****

 

It could only last so long without scrutiny. 

Lucifer either happened to be doing some late-night carousing in Camden, or he was following Morrigan. Neither was unlikely, but Morrigan rather suspected the latter. Lucifer loathed not knowing things. It was one of his innumerable vices.

Whatever the cause, Morrigan turned round from kissing Cameron goodbye on his doorstep -- the hour was early enough that no one was around to see, or at least ought not to be -- to see a familiar crimson carriage waiting across the cobbled street.

“So this is why you’ve been absent from my parties of late, Morrigan,” Lucifer said with a very white smile, when he swung the carriage door open to admit Morrigan in from the sharp clarity of the freezing morning. “You might’ve just said. You can always bring your pet along, you know.”

“No,” said Morrigan, without explanation, once he was seated, and that  _ did  _ make the charming smile falter.

Lucifer did not hear  _ no _ terribly often. He almost never heard it from Morrigan. Accordingly, he had never learned to take it well.

He leaned back against the seat, expression thoughtful, as if attempting to decipher the god-shaped puzzle placed in front of him. “Surely not on Woden’s account,” he said. A statement, not a question. “You have never been that much for hypocrisy.”

“No,” Morrigan said again. He looked out the window as the driver started the carriage forward.

“More interesting by the second,” Lucifer said. His red eyes were intent. He looked enthralled by this latest development, enthralled and somewhat disgusted, as if by a particularly gruesome tableau. “Can it be that you  _ love  _ him? This human boy, this  _ nothing _ , has tempted you away from the rest of us, where you belong?”

That called Morrigan’s attention back, sharp and abrupt, like a whip cracking. “He is not nothing,” he said, in a sudden, dark voice more crow than man.

Lucifer’s eyes gleamed in triumph at having gotten a satisfactory response at last.

“He is a pretty thing, I’ll grant you that,” he said, shrugging one shoulder in a distinctly desultory manner. “But there are a great many pretty things in this world, my dear. You’ll grow bored of this one, as you have all of your other treasures.”

His voice was sure. He did not know.

“We shall see,” Morrigan said, and looked back out the window at all the world passing them by.

  
*****

 

“I will die when you do,” Cameron told him in late spring. 

Morrigan turned to him, curious. “You know that isn’t how this story goes.”

“It is. You’ll take my heart along with you,” Cameron replied, so young and so serious as he spoke of dying. “Even if I keep breathing, that’s no life at all.”

_ Don’t say that _ , Morrigan ought to have replied.  _ Don’t even think it. _

But he loved the sound of it. It was like poetry. It was fit for the finest of tragedies. How delightful, how intoxicating, to be something from which one could never recover.

He would never have asked it, not out loud. But in the dark, selfish shadows at the back of his mind, it was what he wanted.

“You don’t mean that,” he said instead.

“I do,” Cameron said. There was no doubting the certainty in his expression. The wind whipped his grey scarf back and forth. “It seems we are both cursed after all.”

 

*****

 

“Is it possible?” Morrigan asked, when Lucifer first proposed his mad, dangerous idea.

“Anything is possible,” Lucifer said, eyes bright. “Anything in creation. Whether it will work? Well, as to that, we shall have to see.”

There were forty-five days left. He knew Cameron kept track of them on a scrap of paper hidden in the back of a book he never read, tucked beneath the bed. He knew Cameron thought he did not know.

Forty-five days, and then they would be parted forever.

But now, maybe not.

 

*****

 

Cameron never came to Nelson Square but once. It was the day they were leaving to go abroad for the final time.

The doorbell chimed, and Woden and Morrigan exchanged a glance because they were not expecting their driver for another hour at least.

“I see your friendship with Lucifer has at last removed you of your last shreds of decency,” Woden commented, after twitching aside the curtain in the sitting room to look out at the steps. She did not look surprised. “Bad enough to pretend as if I might not know, but to bring him here?”

Morrigan joined her at the window, and she stepped back as he stepped closer with a practiced ease.

“I did not ask him here,” Morrigan said, resting a hand on her shoulder. “I would not have.”

“How thoughtful,” Woden said with audible mocking. She shrugged his touch away, like she always did. “Best go and see what it is he wants.”

“You have only weeks left,” Cameron said, out on the sidewalk. His green eyes were brighter than ever, and he was shivering. He was dressed too lightly for the cold, as he so often was. “Weeks. And now you’re leaving London.”

_ You’re leaving London _ , he said.

_ You’re leaving me _ , they both heard.

“I have to,” Morrigan said. It did not seem like enough. He did not know how to make it enough. He shrugged his coat carefully off and draped it around Cameron’s shoulders. Cameron did not even seem to register it.

“Don’t lie to me,” he said, looking only at Morrigan. “Never to me. You promised, remember? You  _ want  _ to go. You don’t have to.”

There was some truth to that. But he did have to, also. He had to, or else they were all lost. He had to, if they had any chance.

He would not be able to come back for Cameron without first risking leaving him forever.

But he could not give him that hope either, not when despite all of Lucifer’s posturing it might still end up to be false.

“Fear not for the future,” Morrigan whispered, tipping his forehead to lean against Cameron’s. “Weep not for the past. My love transcends death, Adonais. I will wait for you in the next life.”

“You can’t know that,” Cameron said. He shivered again, gathering Morrigan’s coat around himself. He shook his head. He looked hopeless. He looked like he was watching his whole world fall apart, piece by piece. “Even if you could, how would you ever find me?”

“I can, and I will,” Morrigan said. The crows were in his voice again, their wings rustling together. “I promise you, as I promised you before. I will always find you in the dark.”

 

*****

 

When he came back inside, Woden made a sound of violent disgust without turning, as if she could not even stand to look at him.

“I never meant for him to come here,” Morrigan said.

“You understand so little,” she said, with a curt laugh. Her pen  _ skritch _ ed on the parchment spread out in front of her. “You always have, you who fancies himself so worldly and wise. You could parade a thousand lovers through here, and it would make no difference to me. I do not hate you on my own account, today. I hate you on his.”

“His?” Morrigan repeated, certain he had misunderstood.

Her pen stilled, and she turned to him with an expression of utter disdain. “Yes,  _ his. _ This child you made love you. The one you brought far enough into our world to taste it and not nearly far enough to satisfy him. You have ruined him. His own life will never be enough now, and I think you know it. I think you knew it from the start.”

She turned away again, her hair in its neatly bound plait slipping over one bare shoulder. “I think it delights you,” she said without inflection. “This is the cruelest thing you’ve ever done, by half.”

Morrigan was not accustomed to feeling helpless. He felt it now, looking out the frost-laced window, watching the figure in his black coat walk away down the lane. “What can I do?”

“There is nothing you can do,” she said, stoppering her bottle of ink. “There is nothing any of us can do. We are already dead.”

 

*****

 

They were so close, and then they weren’t.

So close, and then it was over.

 

*****

*****

 

There was often, she had heard, a cause and effect to these sorts of things.

She had yet to find either.

 

*****

 

She was Marian.

And then she was the Morrigan ( **and then** **_they_ ** **were the Morrigan** ).

And the love of her life was a boy named Cameron, and he was beautiful, and unfaithful, and hers.

And this time, she bade him follow her into the dark.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I KNOW, I KNOW, BAPHOMET WAS THE FIRST BAPHOMET but also since that's not really his name like, whatever, it's possible!! anyways!! you're not my mom!!!!


End file.
